Brendan Iribe, Oculus’s chief executive, said in a conversation with the Wall Street Journal that his primary concern was ensuring his team remained independent and had enough capital to invest in compelling content. Mark Zuckerberg, he said, shared that vision.

Edited excerpts:

WSJ: How did all this happen?

Brendan Iribe: If you know the history, I got introduced to (founder) Palmer Luckey. And we got together, and Palmer had plans to launch a Kickstarter all by himself. He had made a little video of himself talking about it.

When we saw that, and we said “Hey, Palmer, if you work with us, and we got in there, we could actually help you launch this faster, bigger and better. And we could make it more accessible to people by making it a real developer kit and not a do-it-yourself kit and there were all these things we brought to the table.”

When we met Mark (late last year), a lot of things started to resonate.

WSJ: One thing we’ve heard from game makers is that you can’t just take a normal videogame and make it work with Oculus. It needs specialized content that costs money to make.

Iribe: Yes…. Making virtual reality content, it’s a new medium and it’s actually more of a new computing platform and medium than we’ve seen in an incredibly long time. I tend to think of it like as big as the beginning of the computer, where in the beginning you had the first computer, and suddenly you had this 2-D monitor connected to a computer, and you could do this incredible new digital technology and applications and entertainment and experiences but all trapped within a 2-D monitor.

Now with virtual reality, you can replace the vision and you can replace your eyes and do it comfortably, this is it. This is the final platform and place you can go. Once you replace your vision and can completely change everything you look at and that you see and you can bring in your own hands and other people and other avatars and have this shared sense of a new universe and a new possible experience, this is it.

WSJ: How did the deal come together?

Iribe: About a week and a half ago, Mark and I were talking and Mark said, “I think we can get behind this and help you guys, and at the same time completely leave you independent and doing it your own way.” That resonated with us and we talked down to discuss it some more. And he said if we’re going to do this, we’d like to just do this really quickly.

We locked ourselves in the Facebook HQ and just got the deal done really fast. To make this happen, and not disrupt the team. We don’t want to go through months of some kind of negotiations.

We put out a set of terms that said if we’re really going to do this together, this is what we think it would take, and this is the commitment you need to make: Leaving us independent and investing in the platform.

Mark took it back to his team, went through the motions on it, and said “I’m not sure what everyone in the world’s going to think about this, but I believe in it so much, I’m willing to make this leap with you guys and I really believe we can deliver this next incredible computing platform together. So, and I’m being really honest here, if you guys will agree to these terms that you asked for, and we can do this fast, I think we can get this done in a few days.”

I would never have imagined we could have gotten this thing done in a few days. But the Facebook and their commitment to just moving fast, which is our commitment to moving fast, we locked ourselves up, we didn’t sleep for many hours, just a few hours, we didn’t sleep for a few days, and we came out of it even happier about the relationship.”